Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Salisbury Cathedral and Wyatt ‘the Destroyer’ 25 : the spur to action.
If there was one key site in the great debate about Gothic it was Salisbury
Cathedral. The beau idéal of the Decorated style, one of the few cathedrals to have been
built virtually in a single campaign, it was all but completed in the fifty years following
its consecration in 1220, and it became a symbol for John Constable, the Conservative as
for Cobbett the Radical, and for many more of their contemporaries, of all that the
Middle Ages could tell the present about what was right and what, especially, was wrong,
with modern England. It was at Salisbury in 1789 that a great debate began. It started in
the Gentleman’s Magazine. Since 1780 the magazine had been largely under the
editorship, shared with David Henry, of the publisher and antiquary John Nichols (1745-
1826). Its reviews editor was Richard Gough (1735-1809), Director of the Society of
Antiquaries. The magazine accordingly gave considerable prominence to antiquarian
subjects and increasingly these were medieval: ‘From 1780 onwards’ (the year Nichols
assumed principal responsibility for the editorial content), Kenneth Clark noted that
‘Giant Fungi and Greek Inscriptions begin to yield to Gothic architecture as a subject of
the illustrations; and in the 1783 volume there is an article on Gothic practically every
month’. 26 These articles were chiefly descriptive or loosely discursive. Readers also
wrote in with personal observations. The even tenor of these modest contributions was
violently interrupted, however, in October 1789 by a letter from ‘RG’, Richard Gough,
which made ominous use of the past tense.
I know no cathedral in Great Britain in which the imagination and taste of an Antiquary might have been
indulged with more extent and advantage, than that of SALISBURY. The architecture was of the boldest
and lightest style, the design uniform and elegant, the execution equal to its situation, and the lofty spire the
wonder of the kingdom….Such was Salisbury cathedral till the middle of the present century.
25
Neither Alexandrina Buchanan nor I have been able to discover who first applied this epithet to Wyatt. It
is used, without source in Crook, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival. p. 27.
26
Clark, The Gothic Revival, p.72.
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